For our special 50th anniversary issue, Canada’s brightest, boldest, and most rebellious thinkers, doers, and creators share their best big ideas. Through ideas macro and micro, radical and everyday, we present 50 essays, think pieces, and calls to action. Picture: plans for sustainable food systems, radical legislation, revolutionary health care, a greener planet, Indigenous self-government, vibrant cities, safe spaces, peaceful collaboration, and more—we encouraged our writers to dream big, to hope, and to courageously share their ideas and wish lists for our collective better future. Here’s to another 50 years!

We Ukrainian-Canadians landed east of Edmonton in 1892 and have never stopped extolling the wisdom of our forebears in choosing to settle on “free lands” in an apparent “wilderness” on which railway track had been fortuitously laid for our benefit. Years of the familiar litany of perseverance, fortitude, and sacrifice followed, and, hey, presto! rolling fields of wheat and canola on farms so big they look like the kolkhozes of Soviet yesteryear. In the cities, we have other fruits of great-great-grandbaba’s resilience: our Ph.D.s and QCs, our SUVs and time-shares, our cabinet ministers and comedians on CBC TV.

We visit the ancestral graves in rural church yards: headstones written in Cyrillic we no longer know how to read. We vote for politicians with Ukrainian last names who send us Easter and Christmas greetings in our community newspapers in Cyrillic—that they can’t read either. We send our kids to Ukrainian dance school (great costumes) because we are so damn colourful. We eat perogies and send money to orphans in Ukraine (there are a lot of them) and wear Remembrance Day poppies because, you know, we’re proud Canadians.

Ever since we Ukrainian-Canadians climbed up from bohunk status to poster kids of multiculturalism in the 1970s, we have scarcely changed our tune.

Just watch the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Museum’s promotional video. In it are horse-drawn wagons, onion-domed churches, a grain elevator, a young woman in a babushka weeding her garden. The amiable narrator in a woolen flat cap tells us that a visit here is “a way for Albertans to learn about their past.” This is substantial hogwash.

The implication is that, prior to the prodigious investment of our labour, the land had been useless, unproductive, and uninhabited. Albertans learn nothing of the fact we took homestead title on land ceded to the Crown by the Cree. They will learn nothing of the remarkable success of Ukrainian-Canadian socialists and Communists in organizing immigrants not on farms but in the packing plants, the mines, the extra gangs on the railways of western Canada.

Next year is the 125th anniversary of those first homesteads in now-legendary Edna-Star settlement east of Edmonton. It’s an ideal opportunity to reboot the narrative, especially since, with the virtual erasure of socialist, suffragist, and anti-racist contributions to that story, the unsuspecting Albertan at the Heritage Village has no idea the “settler” identity is so complex. How a landless family in bare feet on an Edmonton station platform could also be unwitting squatters on Indigenous land. How we now struggle to remember great-grandbaba’s stories of the “Indiany” who were hired on at harvest time, stories told once and never again. How nevertheless we would call this land mother and give thanks for it through our labour in the face of economic despair and dispossession. How some forebears skipped the homestead and worked as ditch-diggers in Edmonton, inspired by Wobblies from Montana to go out on strike. How the settlers’ children became school teachers in the back of beyond, the necessary bridge between ancestral folk customs and more-British-than-thou patriotism.

I could go on. The alternative stories are legion, and I am learning some of them as I prowl through my own family’s “archive,” which includes that ditch-digger, those schoolteachers and even a great-uncle who was deported from Canada as a radical, went back to the ancestral village and later hanged himself. They offer us the wonderful opportunity to turn our attention to our stories not in nostalgia but in critique and re-imagination. The future has the potential to be a whole lot more interesting than our mythologized past.

Canadian politicians have also taken a stand—albeit with significantly more loaded language. Over the past few days, Stephen Harper and foreign affairs minister John Baird have been in discussion with the Ukrainian ambassador Vadym Prystaiko. And, in public statements, both Harper and Baird have compared Russia’s actions to that of Nazi Germany on the eve of WWII.

While on CBC’s Power and Politics, when asked about Russia’s right to protect so-called “Russian rights” in Crimea because of it majority Russian-speaking population, Baird answered: “The Sudetenland had a majority of Germans. That gave Germany no right to do this in the late 1930s.”

On March 4, Harper also told the House of Commons: “What we’ve seen is the decision of a major power to effectively invade and occupy a neighbouring country based on some kind of extra-territorial claim of jurisdiction over ethnic minorities. We haven’t seen this kind of behaviour since the Second World War.”

This statement followed the decision to raise the Ukrainian flag over Parliament Hill in a sign of support for the new Ukrainian government, and a universal condemnation of Russia’s actions in the House of Commons on Monday.

Indeed, politicians from all sides of the Canadian political spectrum are condemning Russia’s actions and showing support to the new government. Liberal MP Chrystia Freeland arrived yesterday in Kiev, to join the Canadian  Conservative-led delegation, which arrived last week to welcome and show support to Ukraine’s fledgling government. She spoke to CBC news about the importance of solidarity:

It’s really important for me right now as a Canadian MP outside Canada in a country which is in grave jeopardy to present a united front with the government … So there’s no dissent between me and the Liberal Party and the prime minister and the foreign minister on Ukraine right now.

While not physically represented in Kiev, the NDP party has been expressing concern for Ukrainian citizens since December 10th 2013, near the start of the peaceful protests. Paul Newer, the NDP foreign affairs critic, also wrote to Baird asking for a government-wide delegation to Ukraine. While the “government-wide” aspect of the request was ignored, Dewer was reported to tweet “Glad for Canadian delegation to #Ukraine as NDP requested. Too bad only MPs from one party. We all stand with Ukrainian people.”

Harper, along with six other G-8 countries, has also agreed to boycott all preparatory meetings of the G-8 meeting scheduled in Sochi later this year, recalled the Canadian ambassador from Russia, and has suspended all joint military activities with Russia with threats of further severing of ties if the situation is not resolved.

Harper said in a statement March 4 that: “We continue to view the situation in Ukraine with the gravest concern and will continue to review our relations with President Putin’s government accordingly.”

Ukrainian Crimean Tatars, a muslin minority in the Crimea region that are strongly opposed to Russian rule, have planned another protest outside the Russian embassy this Friday.